Garamendi’s Work Ethic: He Wears It Well

It is an especially grand day to be in the wine country. The hills are lush green. The sky is bright blue and the temperature is in the 70s. The vines are starting to put out shoots, which soon will flower and produce grapes.

And on a weekday during the off-season for tourists, it is a tranquil place reserved primarily for the vintners.

But Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi is here.

Garamendi--the underdog candidate for governor, who lags behind Treasurer Kathleen Brown in polls and fund raising just seven weeks before the Democratic primary--is in the sun outside a cellar, in jeans and boots. He’s “topping off barrels” of chardonnay at the isolated Iron Horse winery, so far off the beaten path in Sonoma County that it can be found only by word of mouth.

Garamendi dips a brush in water and swabs the top of a 20-case oak barrel. Then he removes the plug and stirs the ’93 vintage that has been fermenting since September. Finally, he tops off the barrel by pouring more chardonnay from a pitcher, replacing wine lost by evaporation. He does this all morning, working alongside a field worker named Jose, in a job that pays $6 an hour.

This is how Garamendi campaigns for governor. “Working for California,” he calls it.

Last Saturday at the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, he donned a waiter’s jacket with bow tie and worked the breakfast for Democratic convention delegates, serving food and clearing tables. A few days before that, he was on the docks at Port Hueneme, unloading crates of bananas off a cargo ship.

Since January, he has worked as a jailer, a lumber stacker, a teacher, a nurse’s aide, a carpenter, a gas station attendant, a dairyman. . . . Once he helped a cow deliver her calf by yanking out the baby with a winch.

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Garamendi’s unorthodox goal is to work a half day in each of California’s 58 counties before the June 7 election. It’s reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s failed, time-consuming 1960 strategy of campaigning for president in each state.

But Garamendi says that by working alongside ordinary people, he learns about their problems and this will help him be a better governor. “You gain insight and understanding that is not terribly common in the world of politics,” he asserts.

It’s also “an enormously important political tool,” Garamendi insists, because he wins supporters among those he meets and attracts local news coverage. But at the Iron Horse winery, co-owner/manager Laurence Sterling and his family already had been Garamendi supporters for many years. And only one other journalist showed up, a photographer for the local newspaper.

Darry Sragow, Garamendi’s campaign manager, wishes his candidate had never dreamed up the “work day” gimmick. The veteran consultant opposed it from the beginning.

“My standard line is he’d meet more people in one hour wearing a sandwich board on a street corner in Los Angeles than he’ll meet in one entire day in most of those counties,” Sragow says.

“I think ‘work days’ are wonderful . . . but when you have to raise the amounts of money you need to run for governor, you have to spend time as a candidate with people who can write checks for $1,000 or more. You spend time in the ‘B’ cities--Beverly Hills, Bel-Air, Brentwood . . . ‘Work days’ are not efficient, and they handicap the candidate.”

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Garamendi grins and tolerates this seeming insubordination. “After all, I’m the candidate, and I get to run the campaign the way I want to,” he says. “I refuse to sit in an office all day and dial for dollars.

“I’ve got great pollsters,” the candidate continues, “but they can’t tell me about the woman I met whose husband is dying of lung cancer and she needs him to live for another 31 days so he can be eligible for Medicare and pay the bill, or about the guy in the lumber mill who is losing his job because the governor walked away from the negotiating table on the Sierra accord, or the young mother who folds laundry in a nursing home and is going to quit her job and go on welfare so she can afford to take classes at a community college.”

The truth also is that Garamendi, who grew up on a Sierra cattle ranch and became a Cal Bear football star, enjoys these “work days.” For a politician, he’s a rarity. He actually knows how to do hard labor--weld, hammer, saw--and, at age 49, still is in shape to do it. For him, this is relaxation and escape. And it gives him an excuse--practically anyplace he chooses--to wear his campaign uniform: boots, jeans and work shirt.

It’s a novel, noble strategy for a gubernatorial candidate. And if it’s a failed strategy, there are worse ways to lose than topping off barrels of chardonnay on a nice spring day.